Film Reviews by Steve

This was new direction for Nick Broomfield who had achieved some minor celebrity as a provocateur, making controversial documentaries. It's a reconstruction of the real life deaths of 23 Chinese illegal immigrants at Morecambe Bay in 2004, trapped by the tide as they scraped up cockles in the dark.

The victims are conveyed to their deaths by a chain of events which begins with the criminal gangs in China and continues in the UK with administrative corruption and then the local racist thugs who assault them. And then completed by their isolated, horrific drowning. Clearly this is very difficult to watch.

The drama is quite flat because this is reportage; dreadful, but raw and without much insight or finesse, maybe because it was improvised by a non-pro cast. But the catastrophe is so appalling the film becomes deeply moving anyway. And upsetting. The ciné-vérité approach makes it seem personal.

In addition, Broomfield explores the shabby practices of the food industry, particularly the major supermarkets; he exposes the connection between their tragic fate and the food in our mouths. This is a political film perhaps influenced by Ken Loach, and Broomfield delivers a shocking, shaming polemic.

By the new millennium, stories about teenage vampires had become a multimedia bonanza. This is adapted by John Ajvide Lindqvist from his own Swedish bestseller. It takes the usual rules of the Dracula legend and then applies them to a couple of lonely 12 year old kids growing up on a brutalist housing estate in '80s Stockholm.

Both are isolated and maladjusted in their unorthodox families. They are looking for love, but this isn't a romance. It begins as a reflection on their friendship with a light touch on buzz issues like gender, abuse, sexuality... Only one is a boy suffering from social anxiety and classroom bullying... and the other is a bloodsucking vampire!

There is occasional horror, gore and mayhem but this is unlikely to appeal to scare junkies. It's a cult item for sensitive teenagers; apparently the title references Morrissey! Even so, ultimately it becomes clear that the girl- really a castrated boy, but hundreds of years old- is grooming the actual vulnerable child to be her protector.

This is presented as a viable outcome, though it's doubtful social services would be so sanguine. The main weakness is the two inexperienced child actors (Kåre Hedebrant, Lina Leandersson). Among the positives, the director has an eye for visual imagery and framing. And it demonstrates the resilience of vampire mythology.

Famously there's not a drop of blood to be seen in this fun Amicus horror anthology. There are four contemporary tales adapted from short stories by Robert Bloch... and he also wrote the script with the uninspired framing scenario. None of them are groundbreaking, but they each impart a satisfying final twist.

The studio kept the budget way down low by setting most of the intrigue in a single interior. Oh, and via the shamefully shoddy effects and models, though the set design of the house of horror is decent. And as usual Amicus were able to support their genre stars with a few celebrities from television and the stage.

In the best story, Christopher Lee is a grumpy widower who employs Nyree Dawn Porter as a nanny for his shy young daughter, who knows some clever tricks- for an 8 year old. Most of the comedy is courtesy of Jon Pertwee as a ham actor reluctantly stuck in vampire roles, and possessed by his secondhand cape...

The interest isn't so much Ingrid Pitt's eye-catching décolletage, as Pertwee doing an impression of his friend and co-star Christopher Lee; which is obvious, but apparently went over the actor's head! Shame Freddie Francis wasn't available to direct, but this is as good as any of Amicus' collections of spooky stories.

After the millennium there was a wave of films about the interconnectedness of things. Then social media happened and filmmakers turned their lens on how lonely we are. This has something of both. There are three online incidents which illustrate the sadness and isolation of modern life.

So, a struggling, separated couple (Paula Patton, Alexander Skarsgård) are victims of identity theft; an ambitious television journalist (Andrea Riseborough) exposes a chatroom stripper to the FBI; an adolescent boy (Jonah Bobo) attempts suicide after personal photos are spread around school...

Then a vague offline connection is revealed between the threads. The themes may no longer be fresh, but this is still well written with quality performances, led by Jason Bateman as the father of the afflicted teenager. While the film runs, the actors create an interesting and unsettling melodrama.

This mostly disappears on reflection, but leaves an impression of how the human need for connection has been monetised by social media, which exploits normal human frailty and spreads paranoia and anxiety... while amplifying the capacity of individuals to do harm... And 2012 was only the beginning!

*there is some nudity and swearing.

Unblinking look at violent teenage gangs, loosely based on writer-director Peter Mullan's own experiences growing up on a Glasgow council estate in the early 1970s. And he establishes himself as the successor to Ken Loach in the dynasty of British social realism.

His miracle is to make this brutally authentic but not so sickening it's impossible to watch. Well, there is aggro... but no gore. There is plenty of sweary gallows humour. And also some consideration of why all this is happening, but without any political editorials.

The scary ASBO excess is tolerable due to a mesmerising performance by newcomer Conor McCarron as the adolescent who gets big and goes wild inside a few weeks one summer and traumatises everyone... Including his abusive/alcoholic dad- played by Mullan.

You can sense the siren of migraine-inducing white noise going off inside the boy's head. This is a candidate for the most convincing juvenile delinquent film ever made. And many have tried. But it's too harrowing for entertainment and good luck with the accents.

*includes constant swearing.

This is from a period in the 1970s when environmentalists lobbied against nuclear energy. Now that big oil is the devil, it seems incredibly dated. It makes a fairly comprehensive case, though what is most startling now is how steampunk the technology is! Those combustion chambers and cooling networks look like they were designed to wobble loose... as they inevitably do!

In 1979 this seized the zeitgeist after the near miss at Three Mile Island. Now, the complacency of wealthy corporations by-passing safety measures still resonates, but the message has mostly expired. So this is just another Hollywood thriller... and an endearing memento from the decade when fashion got lost. It looks horrible, including the very austere photography.

Jane Fonda plays an ambitious reporter reluctantly presenting lifestyle fluff on a Los Angeles tv news station... while silently tolerating the ubiquitous sexism. When she interviews the head of publicity at a nuclear power plant, it's clear that in the background something is going very wrong. Jack Lemmon is the loyal company man who threatens to blow the whistle.

He's the main reason to watch; back then he portrayed the careworn, midlife American wage slave better than anyone. Eventually it loses credibility when he takes over operations at gunpoint, but there is an impression of a nation in decline evident in many '70s Hollywood films which feels very much like now. And it's fun to see Wilfred Brimley in the Homer Simpson role!

This Norwegian original is superior to the more widely known US remake of 2002. This version was filmed around Tromsø in the Arctic Circle. Stellan Skarsgård stars as a confrontational Swedish detective working in Oslo who travels north to investigate the murder of a 17 year old girl. But after he accidentally kills his likeable sidekick in some heavy fog, the inquiry gets a lot more personal.

And he must play sordid mind games with the main suspect, the provocative middle aged novelist (Bjørn Floberg) who was buying the victim expensive clothes. This isn't much of a whodunnit as the maverick cop mainly closes the case by blundering between the suspects. The interest is in the 24 hour cycle of sunshine, and the insomnia which widens the cracks in the cop's psyche...

Maybe this ceaseless, inescapable light represents his guilt, or the trauma of a career spent exposing the foul motivations of sleazy transgressors. But still, he strays far from the law. This was released ahead of the wave of Scandinavian noir which became popular in the new millennium. And it differs interestingly because rather than fill the screen with darkness, this is often dazzlingly bright.

And the screen is saturated in whiteness, whether the snow on the hills or the mist over the fjords... so it has its own unconventional atmosphere. Skarsgård gives some brooding psychological depth to the unravelling sleuth. It's slow, but still suspenseful and engagingly desolate and downbeat, which is deepened by the gloomy score of ambient electronics. And yes- you must visit Tromsø!

The Coen brothers' debut feature is an ironic spin on two related genres. The visual style is neo-noir, and the screenplay is hardboiled pulp fiction. The title is from Dashiell Hammett, and the influence is more the earlier Continental Op stories than his better known- more literary- later novels.

There's a routine murder setup about a husband who owns a bar in Texas (Dan Hedaya) who pays to have his wife (Frances McDormand) and her lover (John Getz) killed in a cheap motel by a sleazy/pragmatic gumshoe (M.Emmet Walsh). Only obviously the plan falls apart in complicated and violent ways.

The cast performances are no more than competent, with Walsh the standout as the whiny, duplicitous private dick. It's a low budget, independent production, so there isn't much gloss, which suits the pulp fiction more than the neo-noir; the photography has a trashy/tacky made for tv look.

This is best for the genre pessimism and the gloomy nocturnal atmosphere, with the neon lit soundstage, the dark, rainy highway and the dream-logic. Plus the ambient electronic score. Hard to imagine this will have much appeal outside the usual genre buffs, though surely the Coen faithful will love it...

*note. This copy of the original release is cropped for old 4/3 televisions and the sound and picture are poor. The directors' cut is slightly shorter, but then it could do with a trim... I've not seen it but I assume the revised bluray version is a better bet.

Faithful adaptation of a war memoir by Wladyslaw Szpilman, a Jewish classical pianist who hid in the Warsaw ghetto throughout the Nazi occupation of Poland, while his family was murdered in the death camp at Treblinka. It's a harrowing account of a survivor who endured mostly by pure luck while the city was destroyed by the German army.

This is personal for director Roman Polanski, who lived through WWII in similar circumstances after his parents were sent to concentration camps; his pregnant mother died at Auschwitz. Most of the first part of the story is familiar and suffers from a poor script and performances from the British support cast. It mainly restates the vileness of fascism.

The second half is stronger as the pianist appears to grow feral in the ruins of Warsaw, scavenging for food. Ultimately, when he plays Chopin for a German officer, we are assured that this music represents his humanity; it is his own personal resistance. Adrien Brody won a well deserved Oscar in the title role and maybe even eclipses Polanski's film.

His slow degradation is horrifying. While the narrative is dramatically uneven and reworks conventional situations, there is value as a warning from history. It demonstrates what atrocities the citizen is capable of when there is no law; whether it's obeying orders to clear the ghetto with flamethrowers... or trying to set fire to a hostel containing refugees.

A lifelong labour of love from Richard Attenborough, who was obviously able to call in a few favours as, aside from Ben Kingsley's uncanny Oscar winning performance as Mohandas Gandhi, there are dozens of British actors of a certain age, mostly cast just to deliver a line or two. Still, it's the title portrayal which stays in the memory.

The studious hagiography starts with the young lawyer thrown out of first class on a South African train in 1883 and ends with the assassination of the iconic leader in New Delhi in 1948. It looks spectacular, with the lovely photography of India in Panavision, but mostly there is political conversation, some editorialising and many speeches...

So an interest in the history is surely essential. There is an attempt to explain the heart of the man, but for three hours this is overwhelmingly about his political vision for India, and his revolutionary means of achieving it through nonviolent resistance. The script is interested in exposition and communicating the ideas, more than realism.

The recreation of the period is exceptional. Attenborough tells the momentous life with clarity and impetus until the last 30m when the hero begins to fade out of events during the war of partition. Eventually the Mahatma seems to become a benign and mythic prophet; the dissident who gave the world a model for peaceful political protest.

It's a hard world to get a break in... Everyone is searching for something - or someone- to make a better future seem possible; a New Deal to unite the whole country. Yes, this little known sleeper re-imagines a depression era Frank Capra comedy for the ordinary underdog traumatised by eight years of divisive Reaganomics.

Dustin Hoffman plays a petty crook who enters a burning plane crash and steals a purse, while anonymously/incidentally saving all the passengers, including Geena Davis, a determined newshound with a heart. Yes, she's our Barbara Stanwyck! Andy Garcia is a homeless Vietnam vet who claims the reward because he's broke.

Or more thrillingly, he assumes the Gary Cooper role in Meet John Doe (1941). Hoffman almost wrecks the film with a clumsy performance that sends up the script. But it survives. This is optimistic, feelgood Capra for a new economic recession. Heck a brass band plays Auld Lang Syne at the climax! And then, there's a clever bonus...

Famously Meet John Doe had no possible ending that complied with the Production Code. The studio even failed to overcome the obstacle by running a competition. Fifty years on, this has another go. And it's better, though still the weakest part of a satirical comedy which mysteriously flunked but deserves a second chance.

Nostalgic rites-of-passage story which despite several implausibilities, eventually delivers a dose of sentimental heartbreak. OK, this is set in a prestigious private school in New England, but it's hard to believe that even the WASP male offspring of the conservative elite would be quite so compliant... especially in the beat/rock & roll era.

This 1959 is a very foreign country... where the new English master (Robin Williams) inspires the boys to comply with his wacky teaching methods, rather than they make a pact to destroy him with silence! And then they form... a poetry club! We live in more cynical times, but reality barely intrudes into this stronghold of privilege.

And it's a struggle to sympathise with the growing pains of these super-rich kids in the era of civil rights; they are on the precipice of the radical '60s- and Vietnam- which will change everything. Plus, where is the stuff about teenage sexuality? Williams' puckish performance has badly dated, though the younger cast survives unscathed.

Robert Sean Leonard is the standout as a wannabe actor dominated by his strict, austere father. Director Peter Weir skilfully pulls the emotional levers, and there's a strong period feel. Ultimately, this is worthwhile for anyone who loves poetry, and those who value the potential for schoolteachers to inspire children, over a lifetime.

Cheerful comedy-horror aimed at a family audience. Debut director Frank Marshall says he was inspired by Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds (1963) and that's apparent in the coastal California location. But this is much lighter in mood and milder in shocks- and not as good. There's one big scare...

This is mostly for children. But it's still decent entertainment with a funny script and extremely good effects/make up. Jeff Daniel stars as an arachnophobic big city doctor who arrives in a picturesque small town with his nice family in the middle of an invasion of poisonous Amazonian spiders.

If this sounds like a formula, maybe that's because it was produced by Steven Spielberg after he re-wrote the rules of the Hollywood family film. This is unremarkable in that context, but still fun. Daniels is a comfortable sitcom dad, though Harley Jane Kozak is stuck in a duff role as his perky wife.

John Goodman as the idiot from pest control is presumably there for the younger kids. Then there's an excellent support cast of familiar character actors playing the provincial eccentrics. There are few surprises- and an excess of of comic relief- but still a few creepy shivers and quite a lot of ick.

For enthusiasts of studio era gaslight melodrama this is celluloid comfort food. This remake of Joseph H. Lewis' low budget woman-in-peril classic My Name is Julia Ross (1945) is updated to the 1980s and obviously revised by aficionados. So there are many familiar motifs for genre buffs to pick up on...

Like the glass of milk from Suspicion (1941). And all those mousetraps! Plus the script tightens up the premise fairly well. Mary Steenburgen is an out of work actor cast in the crazy psychodrama of a mad medic who forces her to stand in for a lookalike dead patient until a blackmail scheme pays off.

The remake- as always- is much longer, and credibility gets lost in a sequence of climaxes meant to crank up the horror. Steenburgen plays three roles so it's a showreel for her. As the kidnap victim she suffers even better than Nina Foch in the original. Jan Rubes is splendidly nuts as the evil manipulator.

The original has cult status and this made hardly any impact. But it's a quality production with a standout music score. The old dark house lacks noir atmospherics, but the hostile winter weather is an ok substitute. While it's not as good as Lewis' programmer this is a remake which shows it some real love.

This unorthodox ghost story is the peak of a wave of supernatural films that came out of Japan around the millennium. It is obviously influenced by contemporary Hollywood but also has some of the woozy, narcotic ambience of the silent melodramas of the 1920... and boasts arguably the greatest scare scene in a hundred years of cinema.

It rejuvenated horror with its original premise and new rules. These are taken from Koji Suzuki's novel: schoolkids pass around a video which will- somehow- kill you a week after viewing... and you will die of fear. With that setup, the shock climax had better be scary, and it doesn't disappoint. Then Hideo Nakata gives it a definitive J-horror look.

So the long black hair! And the creepy b&w videotape itself, with its arcane runes. Like the best fright films, it reflects on social anxieties. It intuitively captures tensions in the culture, like reservations about technology, or the folkloric conspiracies of urban myths. But especially, with the chilling subversion of gerontocratic Japanese values...

As in most US horror, there is a focus on teenage interaction. And it's female led, with Nanako Matsushima as the plucky reporter/scream queen. But the breakout star is Hiroyuki Sanada as her spooky ex-husband- surely the Donald Pleasence of J-horror. While not flawless, it's the most innovative genre film of its decade. Best watched on VHS.